Interviews with Doan View Hoat

First, before 1975, I got a scholarship to go to study in America. And I got a Ph.D in 1971, and I came back to South Vietnam with my wife and our first son to work at Van Hanh University. It´s a private Buddhist university. And as a vice rector of the university, we tried to improve the curriculum and the administration of the university. We took model of American university.

So after 1975 I decided to stay home because I thought that we didn´t have war any longer, so I hoped that we could do something for the country. But then they closed all private university – the communists – and they put me in jail in 1976 accusing me of “Americanizing” Van Hanh University.

So they put me in the prison for 12 years without any trial; I don´t think that they had a very good reason to imprison me. But perhaps because the situation at that time was very difficult for them, so they kept us in jail – myself and many other intellectuals in South Vietnam, and writers and politicians – for 12 years.

And I was released in 1988, just beginning to see what´s happening in Eastern Europe countries and Soviet Union. And so I thought this is a chance for pushing for democracy and freedom for Vietnam, pushing the Communist party to accept changes in politics and culture. So some of my friends and myself, we decided to edit what we called Freedom Forum underground newsletter to advocate democracy and human rights for Vietnam. And we did it for about one year and a half. And they discovered us. And then they put me in jail again in 1990.

Doan Viet Hoat is a writer, scholar and former longtime prisoner of conscience from Vietnam. He has been called “the Sakharov of Vietnam,” a reference to Soviet dissident and Nobel Peace Prize winner Andrei Sakharov. Hoat protested the South Vietnamese government’s suppression of certain Buddhist religious leaders in the 1960s while still a student.

In April 1975, when North Vietnam took over South Vietnam, Hoat remained in Vietnam. He was imprisoned in 1976 when the Communist government embarked on mass arrests of South Vietnamese intellectuals.

He spent the next 12 years in a cramped cell shared with 40 other prisoners.

Upon his release, Hoat began publishing an underground magazine entitled Freedom Forum (Dien Dan Tu Do). After a few months, he was arrested and detained without trial for two years. In March 1993, he was sentenced to 20 years in prison for “attempting to overthrow the people’s government.” Throughout his imprisonment, Hoat continued to issue statements on democracy and to offer criticisms of the regime that were smuggled out of prison. He was then sent to a labor camp in a remote part of the country where he spent four and a half years in solitary confinement.

In 1998, after intense international pressure, Hoat was released and sent into exile. He now lives in the United States and continues his activities to promote human rights and democratic reforms in Vietnam.